October 05, 2006

Jonathan Moller: Our Culture Is Our Resistance

The photographer and human-rights activist Jonathan Moller (b. 1963)
first went to Central America in 1991, where he contributed to "El
Salvador in the Eye of the Beholder," the celebrated exhibition
documenting the war in El Salvador. In 1993, he began working with
indigenous Mayan communities in Guatemala who had been uprooted by the
country’s brutal civil war and were living in the remote countryside as
clandestine, mobile "Communities of Population in Resistance" (CPRs).
Though not rebels, the campesinos were targeted by the Guatemalan
military in a "scorched earth" campaign that wiped out over 450
villages and killed some 200,000 people.

A member of the
Foreign Press Club of Guatemala, in 2000-2001 Moller worked as staff
photographer for a forensic anthropology team of the Quiché Catholic
Diocese's Office of Peace and Reconciliation, documenting the
exhumations of clandestine cemeteries. Though the Guatemalan civil war
was ended in 1996 by a UN-sponsored peace accord, Amnesty International
reports continuing human rights concerns and extreme social inequality
in the country.

Our Culture Is Our Resistance,
published in 2004 by powerHouse books, features 147 black-and-white
photographs from 1993-2001, interspersed with texts by novelist
Francisco Goldman, anthropologist Ricardo Falla and historian Susanne
Jonas, as well as poems and prose by several writers, including an
introduction by Rigoberta Menchú Tum, the Indian peasant social
reformer who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. Parallel exhibitions of
Moller's photographs from Guatemala are currently traveling to venues
in both Europe and the U.S., most recently appearing at the Vermont
Center for Photography in Brattleboro, Sept. 1-30, 2006. [read on...]